Constellations, The Lowry, 9th-13th June 2015 A stage surrounded by white balloons and some slightly hypnotic music. Two actors enter the room. Lights flicker through the balloons, alerting the audience to the fact that something different could be about to happen in front of them, a play that might test the boundaries. Then Marianne (Louise […]
Selima Hill, Jutland (Bloodaxe Books) £9.95, reviewed by Lucy Winrow
Hill’s sixteenth poetry collection Jutland unites the award-winning pamphlet Advice on Wearing Animal Prints and a new sequence, Sunday Afternoons at the Gravel-Pits. The former is comprised of twenty-six short, single stanza poems, each titled and ordered alphabetically. The omniscient narrator introduces us to ‘Agatha’, a social outsider who is possibility on the autistic spectrum […]
Jon Ronson at The Met, Bury, reviewed by Fran Slater
Jon Ronson, The Met, Bury, 22nd May 2015 From his son’s first brush with the world’s worst swearword, to strange encounters with Iain Paisley, via Frank Sidebottom and experiences of secret terrorist meetings, Jon Ronson told tales of his extremely fascinating life with the humbleness and wit his fans have grown used to. He also […]
Talking to Strangers
‘The sooner the new motorway opens the better.’ I hesitated, holding back the impulse to say something about what we were doing, something like; We can’t just arrive into the hospital without talking about it. Eventually, I said ‘Rachel’. Just that; Rachel. like she had locked herself in a room and I was trying to […]
The Funfair, HOME, reviewed by Fran Slater
The Funfair, HOME, 14th May – 13th June The Funfair will be memorable for a whole host of reasons. For some audience members, it might be the bizarre but brilliant freak show from just before the interval, when a blue-headed gorilla girl called Juanita (CiCi Howells) serenaded us from the centre of the stage. For […]
To Kill a Mockingbird, The Lowry, reviewed by Fran Slater
To Kill a Mockingbird, The Lowry, May 19th-2rd To Kill a Mockingbird is everybody’s favourite novel. Well maybe not everybody’s, but you know what I’m getting at. The most studied book on the planet, a feature on more English lit curriculums than any other work of fiction, and a novel that has survived far longer […]
The Call of Nature, The Kings Arms, reviewed by Fran Slater
The Call of Nature, The Kings Arms, Salford, 18th-24th May The Vaults at Salford’s best boozer have already proved themselves to be an optimum place to stage a play. Last year’s The Dumb Waiter from Ransack Theatre was not only a brilliant piece of theatre – it was amplified and improved by the gritty and […]
Dara O’Briain at The Lowry, reviewed by Emma Rhys
Dara O’Briain, Crowd Tickler, The Lowry, May 11-13 2015 If you’re going to book a night to catch a Dara O’Briain stand-up show make it a Monday! As he kept asking us – what are yous doing out on a Monday night?! Yous can snooze if you like… – it became increasingly clear snoozing was […]
King Lear, The Lowry, reviewed by Fran Slater
King Lear, The Lowry, Manchester, 5th-9th May 2015 King Lear is often thought of as Shakespeare’s best and most harrowing tragedy. A brief run through the plot points makes it easy to see why. A loyal and loving daughter banished by an angry father. The same father betrayed and belittled by the two daughters he […]
The Woman in Black, The Lowry, reviewed by Fran Slater
The Woman in Black, The Lowry, 28th April-2nd May 2015 Harry Potter has a lot to answer for. Or at least I think he does. Because if Harry Potter, or Daniel Radcliffe, hadn’t starred in the film version of The Woman in Black, it might have been a little easier to enjoy this theatrical adaptation […]
Benefit, Z-Arts, reviewed by Emma Rhys
Benefit, Z-Arts, Stretford Road, Manchester, 22–23 April 2015 (also shown at the Lantern Theatre, Liverpool, 16–17 April and St Helens Library, 24 April) With less than two weeks to go until the UK general election, and the welfare state high on the agenda, Benefit is a newsworthy piece of theatre that portrays how the changes made to […]
Volker Braun, Rubble Flora: Selected Poems trans. by David Constantine and Karen Leeder (Seagull Books) £14.95
The opening sentence of the introduction to this handsomely produced book reads, ‘Volker Braun is one of Germany’s foremost lyric poets’. Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. Constantine and Leeder just further down the page declare, ‘…he is perhaps better known, internationally at least, as a dramatist, novelist and essayist.’ Later, they strenuously deny […]
Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends, National Portrait Gallery, London, reviewed by Ian Pople
Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends, National Portrait Gallery, May 2015 Madame Ramon Subercaseaux sits tilted back away from the piano on whose keys rests her right hand. Her tilted form creates a diagonal with her head to the right and her train to the left under the keyboard. A colour contrast forms the other […]
The Smiths/Morrissey Convention, The Kings Arms, reviewed by Fran Slater
The Smiths/Morrissey Convention, The Kings Arms, Salford, 12th April 2015 It’s a good thing The Kings Arms is a good pub. A great pub actually. But even in such a wonderful establishment, some may have balked at the long waiting periods between the events at this convention. With a minimum of one hour waiting time, […]
David Der-wei Wang, The Lyrical in Epic Time (Columbia UP) $60.00, reviewed by Emma Rhys
If one harbors ‘feeling’ throughout life, one may end up violating the societal demands of ‘actions.’– Shen Congwen The above quote from fiction writer Shen Congwen, cited by David Der-wei Wang (p.41), articulates the unique challenge facing mid-twentieth-century Chinese artists – striving to adapt themselves to the demands of the Communist Revolution while maintaining a […]
Private Lives, Bolton Octagon, reviewed by Sarah-Clare Conlon
Private Lives, Bolton Octagon, 26th March – 18th April Noel Coward’s 1930 comedy of manners opens with two honeymooning couples discovering their hotel terraces – and their exes. Cue the set-up for all kinds of hilarious consequences, plus a glimpse into the new hedonistic way of living – multiple partners, champagne-fuelled parties, staying up all […]
Anna Karenina, The Royal Exchange, reviewed by Peter Wild
Anna Karenina, Royal Exchange, Manchester, 27th March 2015 Swssshshshshsshwishwishshshshshshshwish. People are whispering in the Royal Exchange. In front of us, in front of what has to be described as something of a stripped down stageset (a large white box on a metal floor), several people gather holding candles. Swssshshshshsshwishwishshshshshwsh. The people behind us – a […]
12 Angry Men, The Lowry, reviewed by Peter Wild
12 Angry Men, The Lowry, Manchester, 23rd March 2015 If you were to learn that I was a big fan of the 1957 Sidney Lumet movie 12 Angry Men starring Henry Fonda, Lee J Cobb, Martin Balsam and Jack Klugman, you’d probably expect me to like a theatrical iteration. But you should know I am somewhat […]
Peter Hainsworth and David Robey, Dante: A Very Short Introduction (Open UP) £7.99, reviewed by Edmund Prestwich
Hainsworth and Robey have to work within the limits of the Very Brief Introduction format. Their first pages rise brilliantly to the challenge. Swift-moving, decisive, sensitive and suggestive, plunging straight into a discussion of two famous encounters in the Inferno, and illustrating points with well-chosen references, this opening would have made me feel I knew why […]
The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2015), dir. Isao Takahata, The Cornerhouse, reviewed by Peter Wild
The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, Manchester Cornerhouse, March 14 2015 Last year, with The Wind Rises, we saw the last film by Hayao Miyazaki, the man responsible (if we can say a single man is responsible) for making the name of Studio Ghibli, the Japanese Disney, a global brand. This year, we see The […]
Tomaž Šalamun, Soy Realidad (Dalkey Archive Press) €9.00, reviewed by Joey Frances
“La syntaxe est une faculté de l’ame.” So opens ‘The Bird Dove’, with a Paul Valéry quotation, in the French. One of my favourites of the contradictory things Walter Benjamin says about translation is: “all translation is only a somewhat provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness of language.” This isn’t merely relevant […]
Prue Shaw, Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity (W. W. Norton) £20.00, reviewed by Edmund Prestwich
If I could recommend only one book on Dante it would be this one by Prue Shaw. Her scholarship is profound and I think she must be a brilliant teacher: she shows an unusual ability to enter imaginatively into the minds of people who don’t have her knowledge. This book isn’t just “approachable”; it comes […]
Manchester Folio: Ali Smith, How to Be Both (Hamish Hamilton) £9.99, reviewed by Alicia J Rouverol
In her 2014 Man Booker Prize shortlisted novel How to be both, Ali Smith twists two narratives, that of a troubled teenager in contemporary Britain and that of a 1460s Renaissance fresco painter, into a single dazzling story. A triumph of doubling, deception and discovery, How to be both considers the twin concepts of art […]
Oklahoma!, The Lowry, reviewed by Emma Rhys
Oklahoma!, The Lowry, Salford Quays, Manchester, 17th-21st March 2015 ‘Oh, what a beautiful morning…’ So starts the original feel-good, frontier-conquering musical Oklahoma!, currently showing at the Lowry. Adapted from the play Green Grow the Lilacs by Lynn Riggs, Oklahoma! is considered a landmark musical, epitomizing the famous duo Rogers and Hammerstein’s innovation to the genre […]
Dylan Moran at The Lowry, reviewed by Fran Slater
Dylan Moran, The Lowry, Manchester, March 15 2015 Observational comedy has taken a bit of a battering in recent years. Ever since Michael McIntyre appeared on the scene, like a Peter Kay tribute act with jokes that mostly revolve around how babies can’t yet speak, some of the big names in stand-up have been turning […]
Frank Ormsby, Goat’s Milk (Bloodaxe Books) £12.00, reviewed by David Cooke
Goat’s Milk, New and Selected Poems by Frank Ormsby, is a welcome opportunity to re-evaluate a significant Ulster poet. It brings together work from four previous collections and forty six new poems which have the thematic and stylistic coherence of a further individual collection. The volume also contains a substantial ‘Introduction’ by Michael Longley in […]
Me and My Friend, The King’s Arms, reviewed by Emma Rhys
Me and My Friend, The King’s Arms, Salford, 9th-13th March 2015 Me and My Friend is an award-winning black comedy by prolific playwright Gillian Plowman, about the lives of four ex-patients of a mental hospital, prematurely released due to ward closures. The comedy is a particularly dark shade of black, and at times the comedic […]
New Collections from Peter Robinson and John Dennison, reviewed by Ian Pople
Peter Robinson Buried Music (Shearsman) £8.95 John Dennison Otherwise (Carcanet Press) £9.99 Early in Peter Robinson’s Selected Poems are the lines, ‘A seamless landscape,/there’s nothing the tired eye/will not integrate’ and later in the same poem ‘What goes away/is only your attention’. There’s a double-take here as the writing suggests that only tiredness will blend […]
Hindle Wakes, Bolton Octagon, reviewed by Sarah-Clare Conlon
Hindle Wakes, Bolton Octagon, 19th February-21st March 2015 ‘Nowt so queer as folk’ might sum up Hindle Wakes; or, at least, ‘nowt so queer as womenfolk’. It’s 1912 and the disenfranchised fairer sex is becoming more demanding, much to the woe of their male counterparts, and to some of the older ladies in Northern England. […]
My Brother’s Country, The Lowry, reviewed by Emma Rhys
My Brother’s Country, The Lowry, Salford Quays, Manchester, 26th–27th February 2015 My Brother’s Country portrays the tumultuous life of Fereydoun Farrokhzad, an Iranian singer, TV presenter, poet and political activist who was forced into exile after the 1979 Revolution and ultimately, it is believed, murdered by the Iranian Islamic State in 1992. The play spans […]
Stewart Lee at The Lowry, reviewed by Peter Wild
Stewart Lee, The Lowry, February 13 2015 John Coltrane performing ‘My favourite things’ (his take on The Sound of Music classic), is not one of my favourite things. John Coltrane performing the full 13 minute and 47 second version of ‘My favourite things’ is very definitely not one of my favourite things. John Coltrane’s 13 […]
Susan Calman at The Lowry, reviewed by Sarah Jane Vespertine
Susan Calman, The Lowry, February 22 2015 In ‘Lady Like’, Susan Calman proves that she’s an old school stand up with a carefully honed performance, making much of frequently addressing the audience as ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’ and working with no distractions on stage, simply herself and a microphone. It’s such an assured and professional set […]
Ross Noble at The Lowry, reviewed by Sarah Jane Vespertine
Ross Noble, The Lowry, February 21 2015 Ross Noble’s new tour is called ‘Tangentleman’, and there are few more appropriate titles for a performance that veers off in so many directions that neither Noble nor his audience are quite sure how they got to any given point. He summed up his own style beautifully when […]
Peter Sirr, The Rooms (The Gallery Press) €11.95, reviewed by David Cooke
The Rooms is Peter Sirr’s eighth collection. A beautifully orchestrated meditation upon the meaning of the word ‘home’, it weighs in at just over one hundred pages and is thus a substantial addition to his work. By profession, Sirr is a linguist, teacher and translator who, like Joyce, Mahon, Clifton, spent many years abroad. It […]
Togara Muzanenhamo, Gumiguru (Carcanet Press) £9.95, reviewed by James Horrocks
A long line runs through Togara Muzanenhamo’s Gumiguru. It is not just the “experiences of a decade” that makes the narratives of this book, it is the lines of the poems on the page, reaching across from margin to margin. The focus of this book is certainly the stories which are largely based in or […]